Comments on: A Successful BarCampOhio/LibraryCampOhio

By: See Also… » LITACamp: How much would you pay?

See Also… » LITACamp: How much would you pay? — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:38:34 +0000

[...] Actually, for Library/BarCampOhio, T-Mobile picked up the tab for lunch and the participants paid for the t-shirts and break snacks with the $25 registration fee. More details are in my summary of the event. [...]

By: the Jester

the Jester — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:15:54 +0000

Bob and I weren’t sure about the question of a registration fee when we were planning this, so I sent a note out to a number of academic library technologists in the state and the unanimous reply was that $25 for a 10am to 6pm event was not significant. As the posting indicated, the meeting space and the internet access was donated by OCLC and the lunch sponsored by T-Mobile, so the $25 went for snacks and a t-shirt. If I were on the participant side rather than an event organizer, I’d answer the same way. For me at least, the $25 registration fee was value-neutral; it neither added to the sense of worth of the meeting, nor was it a detractor.

As an aside, charging a registration fee versus having the event costs covered by sponsors was a bit of a catch-22 — we had a hard time getting sponsors until we started posting lists of paid registrants, then we had T-Mobile and two others come out of the woodwork. The list of interested-but-not-yet-paid people who signed themselves up on the wiki page didn’t seem to be enough to convince sponsors. Were it to be done again, I don’t think I’d recommend charging for registration because BarCampOhio/LibraryCampOhio has been established as a group and the organizers can probably guess that there will be other interested sponsors.

This is the first official BarCamp that I’ve been to (I’m not sure Code4Lib counts as a BarCamp), and it was the first for many others, so I don’t know about how well it was received. As organizers, if we were going to be all formal about it, we could do a follow-up survey to see how it was valued. That probably won’t happen.

By: Laura Solomon

Laura Solomon — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:36:55 +0000

Retweeting @Jill_HW Good post on #BarCampOhio http://tinyurl.com/55k987

By: Jill Hurst-Wahl

Jill Hurst-Wahl — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:29:36 +0000

Good blog post on LibraryCampOhio, http://tinyurl.com/55k987

By: walt crawford

walt crawford — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:20:47 +0000

Interesting report–and your note about the fee raises a question that you’re probably not in a position to answer.

Namely, as compared to other unconferences/BarCamps, did people find this one more useful/worthwhile?

There’s been some discussion suggesting that people will value alternative learning methods more if there is some charge involved–just as (ahem) libraries seem to value priced materials more than free materials.

I speculate a little about this in the September Cites & Insights (not out yet), in a piece about conferences and changes. I’m not sure how you could get real-world evidence, but…